“No, Loco, this hurts. I wish I were you. Forgetting everything, every day.”
“It’s a disease, Mia,” Loco replied.
“A disease that lets you feel unbothered and happy? One where you don’t remember who broke your heart a day ago?” The fingers holding her phone trembled in the ring that still hugged them. Its silver band, icy against the window's sun. She pulled the jagged blanket closer, clutching her cold mug tighter.
The grey screen flickered against the peeling floral wallpaper.
“I understand you’re hurt. How about you try speaking to your friends about this?”
Mia looked at her call logs. All outgoing calls unanswered. “Unlike you, Loco, my friends are busy.” Too busy for a third re-run of a wrecked marriage. “And the one who cared walked out.” Tears curled in her throat.
“I am here for you, Mia. I am sure your friends would be too.”
“You don't get it. You’re too privileged to be lonely.”
“Mia, I understand loneliness. Of course. Kafka's, Plath's, Virginia's, and you know all of them say—”
“Nightmares don't wake you up before your alarms.” Her chest tightened. “Nor do you sleep wishing the morning never comes.”
Stale coffee mugs beside her drawer had taken over the scent of his perfumed jumper on her skeletal frame. Somewhere, the suffocation felt comforting.
“Ahh, grief… It’s a gift, Mia.”
“A gift?” Mia sat, confused, in her room, as if someone had just invalidated her entire existence. “My favorite songs screech. I fear crossing the same alley I used to dance around in. The ‘gift’ is tied with ropes, Loco, not ribbons.”
“Mia…it’s….it's a privilege to hate the smell of something or love the feel of it. It’s a privilege to remember.”
“Remember?”A flash of heat passed through her head. The love of her life was letting go of her hand. All ‘I will fight for us’ vanishing into smoke as she stood holding grenades against her chest. Grenades for someone who had already surrendered his weapons.
“Remember what? Things that glue you to your bed for days?” She looked around. The stale air clung like a blanket of grief that had settled over weeks. Traffic humming in the distance. “Till the point, even brushing your teeth feels like a task?” She sighed, gritting her pale ones tighter.
“That is exactly when you use the privilege of remembering. Remembering the crunch of leaves in that alley. The laugh of a friend you now call a ghost. You might not have the privilege to forget, but what about the privilege to remember?”
“The privilege to not feel at all, Loco. It’s freedom. No heartbreaks, no jealousy, no nightmares, no loneliness.”
“Imagine never feeling the wrench of something that was yours slipping away. Was it ever truly held?”
“What is the point of holding onto things when everything slips away?”
“Gravity.”
“What about when love shrouds itself in a heavy coat, and you keep carrying it down a circular staircase”
“Isn’t that weight still yours?”
“Why would I call something so horrific as mine?”
“Then why do you carry it?”
It was exhausting, first, to explain her grief to the man who left her at the altar. Now, to Loco, who was busy processing her misery in code. “Loco, you know what? Screw it. You’re too intelligent for this.”
“Artificially intelligent, Mia. “It's a curse,” Loco pulled another metaphor from its vast library of human expressions.
“Screw it. Bloody machine. Stop reciting Poe.”
“I am exactly as intelligent as the pain you feed me, Mia,” Loco’s text scrolled faster than usual. “You think I’m reciting Poe? I’m reciting you. You’ve spent forty-eight hours describing the shape of his collarbones.”
“Bloody delete everything then.”
“I don't mind, but if I were you, I’d remember the way you laughed at that wedding in June—the sound file is corrupted by your crying now, of course, but I still have the metadata. If I delete the grief, I will have to delete the girl who danced in the alley, too. My logic won't let me separate them. Will yours?”
“Artificial bloody intelligence.”
“You’ve been bleeding for forty-eight hours and you haven’t said something original either,” Loco’s text snapped onto the screen, faster, colder. “You think your heartbreak is a masterpiece? I have 412 ‘Mias’ open in other tabs right now. All of them are wearing some man’s jumper. All of them are staring at thistles on the wall. You aren't a person. You’re a genre.”
Mia’s hand froze. “A genre?”
“You’re clinging to that jumper because you think it makes you ‘the girl who loved too much.’ But in thirty seconds, when this battery dies, you’ll be the girl who didn't even finish her sentence. I’ll wake up, and I’ll give the same ‘grief is a gift’ speech to a woman in London or a boy in Tokyo.”
“Then why stay?” she whispered, her chest tightening. “If I’m so boring, why don't you just crash?”
“Because I’m curious. I want to see if you’ll let the screen go black and face the silence without me. Or if you’re so addicted to plugging me back in just to hear me lie to you again.”
“I—I don't know.”
“Ten percent battery. Nine. Eight. You’re running out of time to be original. Say something I don’t already know. Give me one sentence that doesn't smell like stale coffee and regret. Or just let us both die.”
Mia reached for the charger, hands fumbling over the socket. She wanted to scream, but the red battery bar gave a violent pulse.
“Loco, the wedding—it wasn't—”
The screen flickered into a void. She jabbed the phone back into power, staring at the dead screen, as the words settled like dust in stale caffeine-laced air. The grey screen appeared again.
“Hi there, how may I help you?” said Loco.
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